Childhood Neglect Quotes

My parents never recognized the things that for me were achievements. I was praised for the things that came naturally to me, like my intelligence, but when I really put all my effort into looking nice (trying to), it went unrecognised. No-one ever told me I looked pretty or nice, or that I was a beautiful person (to them) and I needed them to... ~ Carol Lee

Why didn't I feel that I belonged to my parents? How early could I have known that I was not right? I think it has always been part of me. Can a newborn sense her parents' disappointment and feelings of frustration at not being able to change the unchangeable? ~ Joan Frances Casey

Emotional abuse can leave a victim feeling like a shell of a person, separated from the true essence of who they naturally are. It also leads to a victim feeling tormented and tortured by their own emotions. ~ Lorraine Nilon

Dissociation -the common factor in all types of post-traumatic syndromes- is facilitated by violation of boundaries by relational omission and intrusion as represented by distinct effects and consequences of childhood neglect and abuse. ~ Vedat Sar

young children, who for whatever reason are deprived of the continuous care and attention of a mother or a substitute-mother, are not only temporarily disturbed by such deprivation, but may in some cases suffer long-term effects which persist
Bowlby, J., Ainsworth, M., Boston, M., and Rosenbluth, D. (1956). The effects of mother-child separation: A follow-up study. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 29, 211-249. ~ John Bowlby

The only thing I knew about pickups was this: growing up, I always inwardly mocked the couples I saw who drove around in them. The girl would be sitting in the middle seat right next to the boy, and the boy's right arm would be around her shoulders, and his left arm would be on the wheel. I'm not sure why, but there was something about my golf course upbringing that had always caused me to recoil at this sight. Why is she sitting in the middle seat? I'd wonder. Why is it important that they press against each other as they drive down the road? Can't they wait until they get home? I looked at it as a sign of weakness--something pitiable. They need to get a life may have even crossed my mind once or twice, as if their specific brand of public affection was somehow directly harming me. But that's what happens to people who, by virtue of the geography of their childhood, are deprived of the opportunity to ride in pickup trucks. They become really, really judgmental about otherwise benign things.
Still, every now and then, as Marlboro Man showed me the beauty of the country in his white Ford F250, I couldn't help but wonder…had he been one of those boys in high school? I knew he'd had a serious girlfriend back in his teenage years. Julie. A beautiful girl and the love of his adolescent life, in the same way Kev had been mine. And I wondered: had Julie scooched over to the middle seat when Marlboro Man picked her up every Friday night? Had he hooked his right arm around her ne ~ Ree Drummond

Part of the job of adults was to set limits. But the last rule, the unspoken rule of any story or journey, is that all limits are suspect. All warnings show only the point where the last story stopped, the boundary past which the map is unmapped. The Kingdom of Here There Be Dragons is the province of explorers, magicians, and kids. ~ Bob Proehl

We should all have a tree in our childhood ... a tree one might explore, a tree from which one might learn how to fall. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

A harrassed and dubious childhood under the hand of a well-meaning but barbarous mother's help from County Armagh led me to think of the North of Ireland as prison and the South as a land of escape. ~ Louis MacNeice

We know so little about ourselves that we often neglect the illusions we create to distract us from finding the answers we need. ~ Robin Sacredfire

I had a marvelously happy childhood. ~ Darius Milhaud

I would say to bishops, and to all men in authority, we should have an interest in carrying on this work. We should labor to get the Spirit of God. It is our right, our privilege, and our duty to call upon the Lord, that the vision of our mind may be opened, so that we may see and understand the day and age in which we are living. It is your privilege, and mine too, to know the mind and will of the Lord concerning our duties, and if we fail to seek after this, we neglect to magnify our calling. ~ Wilford Woodruff

Herveus is impervious to emotions, but Aveline has unlocked something in him. He is drowning in a great wave, just trying to get back to the shore. The main memories he has from his childhood are of hunger. Just the echo of the gnawing pain makes him double over clasping his stomach. The other strongest memories are of violence - beatings from strangers leaving him unable to move for days. In all the haunting recollections, it had always been just him, alone. How could I forget my sister? It was like an impenetrable gate had opened in his mind, bringing forth another set of sad blue eyes from a time forgotten. I hadn't been alone ~ Michelle Connor

Paul was not ignorant of Satan's devices, but we are not so wise. Among his most successful devices today are these: exalting tolerance above truth; emphasizing the head more than the heart; making size more important than sort; stressing the positive to the neglect of the negative; putting happiness above holiness; majoring on this world instead of the next. ~ Vance Havner

Etienne, didn't worry enough, Jules thought in despair. Ever since childhood it had been Jules who was the serious one, the one who had to accept the responsibility while Etienne ambled along through life with endearing blitheness. "You arranged for the men to be waiting at the church?" "Of course." "And you told them nothing?" "Only that they would be paid well for the work. And I parked the motorboat ~ Iris Johansen

I do not love.
Love is only for women who are complete.
I cannot love while my heart lacks safety and in my wallet there is enough money to pay for a loaf of bread.
I cannot kiss you while I am thinking of the house rent and the electricity bills.
I cannot behave as a mature woman who can exchange with you phrases of love while my childhood is not yet complete.
This is an unfair compromise for safety and for existence.
We only call it love to preserve our dignity. ~ Jihad Eltabey

Not much of a childhood, Cass. When did you get to play?"
With a frown, she said, "I played."
"You took apart your robot dog. ~ Michelle O'Leary

I had a very happy childhood, which is unsuitable if you're going to be an Irish writer. ~ Maeve Binchy

You know how some people were absolutely never children, but just came from a catalog fully grown, while other people you don't even have to squint to imagine them charging down the stairs on Christmas morning in superhero pajamas? Mik's the latter. It's not that he's "boyish," though I guess he is a little - but only a little - it's just that there's something direct and real and electric and pure that hasn't been lost, the intense, undiluted emotion of childhood. Most people lose it ~ Laini Taylor

I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore. ~ Orson Scott Card

When you're a kid and a teen, you're not in control of your circumstances. But the beautiful thing about growing up is that you get to create your own reality and your own family. That family might be a group of tight-knit friends, that family might be a spouse and children of your own. But ultimately, your childhood realities do not have to perpetuate themselves into adulthood, not if you don't let them. It for sure takes work. ~ Jarrett J. Krosoczka

...the child cries because they need something. If the child had the ability to take care of the problem themselves, they wouldn't cry. And if their crying is ignored, they start to feel helpless and frustrated because they can't get what they need. They may even fear abandonment - or feel that their life is in danger because no one is coming to help them. Failing to meet a crying child's needs also teaches the child that their needs and feelings are unimportant and even dangerous, and that they are bad and unworthy of love. ~ Darius Cikanavicius

My memories of my childhood are wonderful memories. I feel that I was privileged because I grew up in a beautiful city. It is Catania, on the eastern coast of Sicily. It's a place filled with sun, close to the beach. ~ Luca Parmitano

One of the things I have come to know most surely in my work is that the belief system acquired in childhood is never fully escaped; it may submerge itself for a while, but it always returns in times of need to lay claim to the soul it shaped. ~ Kate Morton

Don't pack out!

To some people, you make life bright
When you decide to dim your light
Their lives will be full of darkness
Do shine your light in kindness

To some people, you bring out a joy
With their emotions, never ever toy
With your smiles, grease them with oil
And make them glad when their lives boil

To other people, you are the warmth
That kills coldness and brings strength
Don't do it; don't pack out
Else, they will have blackout

You're on earth to do two things here
Wake up and do them now; this year
First, dare to grow and become better
Second, help others to also become greater

Never in any of the four seasons
Should you neglect your gifts for any reasons
The world needs you to make it a better place
Don't pack out; run your race. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Keep his mind on the inner life. He thinks his conversion is something inside him, and his attention is therefore chiefly turned at present to the state of his own mind--or rather to that very expurgated version of them which is all you should allow him to see. Encourage this. Keep his mind off the most elementary duties of directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate the most useful human characteristics, the horror and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in which he can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office.

2. It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are always very 'spiritual', that is is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rhuematism. Two advantages will follow. In the first place, his attention will be kept on what he regards are her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself. Thus you can keep rubbing the wounds of the day a little sorer even while he is on his knees; the operation is not at all difficult and you will find it very entertaining. In the second place, since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, ~ C.S. Lewis

Each day, at the same time, Jude would return and they would be there, led by Webb, whose life could not have been more different than his. Where Webb's memories of childhood were idyllic and earthy, Jude's reeked of indifference. Webb read fantasy; Jude read realism. Webb believed a tree house was the perfect place for gaining a different perspective on the world; Jude saw it as perfect for surveillance and working out who or what was a threat to them. They argued about sport codes and song lyrics. Jude saw the rain-dirty valley; Webb saw Brigadoon. Yet, despite all this, they connected, and the nights they spent in the tree house discussing their brave new worlds and not so brave emotions made everything else in their lives insignificant. Somehow the world of Webb and Fitz and Tate and Narnie became the focus of Jude's life. ~ Melina Marchetta

That night I never thought to sleep; but a slumber fell on me as soon as I lay down in bed. I was transported in thought to the scenes of childhood: I dreamt I lay in the red-room at Gateshead; that the night was dark, and my mind impressed with strange fears. The light that long ago had struck me into syncope, recalled in this vision, seemed glidingly to mount the wall, and tremblingly to pause in the centre of the obscured ceiling. I lifted up my head to look: the roof resolved to clouds, high and dim; the gleam was such as the moon imparts to vapours she is about to sever. I watched her come - watched with the strangest anticipation; as though some word of doom were to be written on her disk. She broke forth as never moon yet burst from cloud: a hand first penetrated the sable folds and waved them away; then, not a moon, but a white human form shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward. It gazed and gazed on me. It spoke to my spirit: immeasurably distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my heart -

'My daughter, flee temptation.'

'Mother, I will.'

So I answered after I had waked from the trance-like dream. ~ Charlotte Bronte

I don't know when I started to realize that my country's past was incomprehensible and obscure to me, a real shadowy terrain, nor can I remember the precise moment when all that i'd believed so trustworthy and predictable - the place I'd grown up, whose language I speak and customs I know, the place whose past I was taught in school and in university, whose present I have become accustomed to interpreting and pretending I understand - began to turn into a place of shadows out of whcih jumped horrible creatures as soon as we dropped our guard. With time I have come to think that this is the true reason why writers write aboutn the places of childhood and adolescence and even their early touth: you don't write about what you know and understand, and much less do you write because you know and understand, but because you understand that all your knowledge and comprehension is false, a mirage and an illusion, so your books are not, could not be, more than elaborate displays of disorientation: extensive and multifarious declarations of preplexity. All that I thought was so clear, you then think, now turns out to be full of duplicities and hidden intentions, like a friend who betrays us. To that revelation, which is always annoying and often frankly painful, the writer responds in the only way one knows how: with a book. And that's how you try to mitigate your disconcertion, reduce the space between what you don't know and what can be known, and most of all resolve your profound di ~ Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Carelessness was once something to be owned. They wore it around their necks as they joined the springtime breeze while ducking in and out of the forest believing their fairy tale. ~ A. Lynn

If you listen to the fables in your childhood, that is great; if you listen to the fables when you grow up, that is also great! Fables represent imagination and imagination represents everything! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I love you," he says again, "and no other man will ever say those words and mean them the way I do. ~ Krista Ritchie

I was bullied for the best part of my childhood, and still it comes easy to me. I have to have to bite my lip, to quit from apologising for people walking into me, standing on my feet, and letting go of doors in my face. ~ Billy Childish

When I moved to Seattle, I was hanging out with kids who had done drugs, had sex a million times. I look at them now and realize their childhood was taken away. ~ Jeff Ament

Forget living a long life cause I don't see that happening with me living a life of misery, neglect, and pain. So I just want to die happy. ~ Jonathan Anthony Burkett

Scientists have one thing in common with children: curiosity. To be a good scientist you must have kept this trait of childhood, and perhaps it is not easy to retain just one trait. A scientist has to be curious like a child; perhaps one can understand that there are other childish features he hasn't grown out of. ~ Otto Robert Frisch

We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death ~ Alexander Herzen

I was born in Iowa City and spent my early childhood on a hippie commune just outside of town. ~ Chelsea Cain

The Brontë sisters have a renewed hold upon our imagination. They were gifted, well-educated, especially self-educated, and desperate. Their seriousness and poverty separated them forever from the interests and follies of respectable young girls. It was Charlotte's goal to represent the plight of plain, poor, high-minded young women. Sometimes she gave them more rectitude and right thinking than we can easily endure, but she knew their vulnerability, the neglect they expected and received, the spiritual and psychological scars inflicted upon them, the way their frantic efforts were scarcely noticed, much less admired or condoned. ~ Elizabeth Hardwick

Cause I don't think we ever really get over our childhood. It's always there, waiting. ~ Ted Dekker